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kgosden those mountain ridges look really cool & the ducks were a very good spot. Yellow bird is good too but I just find myself wishing you could have positioned the bit of green background behind the bird to separate it from the background a bit more (being very picky now sorry).
Raven maybe it's just me but I'd say your recent shots seem to have more vibrancy is that an effect of the 620 or PP. That last set are very nice but my favourite is the flower one. I really like the colours & DOF effect.

Around every picture there's a corner & round every corner there's a picture
- the fun's in finding them

I expect it's mostly PP, but the new camera may help by allowing highlights and shadows to show more color.

I think my 7-step sharpen/microcontrast/contrast method has a lot to do with it though. Click the button once and it starts to show a little pop. Click twice and all sharpness and microcontrast woes are gone (I click twice for the 70-300mm). Click three times and it begins to cure slightly out of focus images. Four times continues the trend. Click more than four times and I went overboard on all but the most forgiving shots.

kgosden yes that one works much better nice one. Its not that I didn't like the first one I did, it's just that the positioning of the background flowers behind the bird wasn't doing you any favours. With a bit of PS clipping perhaps you could rearrange them such that the fairly regular pattern of flowers in the background is continued but the greaner gap is behind the bird That way it would look like the bird is filling in the flower pattern.

Thanks Raven that's quite involved. I've only got access to elements at the moment but I think I could try something similar. I need to reload elements onto the PC as I've only been using Picasa recently.

Around every picture there's a corner & round every corner there's a picture
- the fun's in finding them

I am not following how these are implemented. When I look at unsharp mask I have Amount in %, Radius in pixels and Threshold. Are you setting Radius = 250 and Threshold = 4? If so, what about the Amount?

I recorded an action that applies 6 levels of unsharp mask followed by auto contrast. They are:

No, those are radius and amount. I left threshold at its default value. It's only a six step version of something many people do as a two step version: say 40% sharpening at 0.5 pixels and 30% at 50 pixels, but I think it's more effective applying it so many different levels in different amounts. Once it is recorded I only have to hit it once, and I can even make it part of a batch so I can do it to all my pictures automatically (I haven't done that yet though).

I refined it recently, because I was getting bad results from over sharpening in the 1-64 pixel range. At the 1-4 pixel radius it tends to bring out noise and make it into larger clumps, and the 4-64 pixel radius makes things... weird.

Raven Sharpener Action

Raven,

So I took your response to mean radius =250, Amount=40% & Threshold=3 (default), etc. Based on that I created a 'Raven Sharpener' action. Here is a before and after. It certainly boosts the apparent sharpness and dehazed the image. However, I am not certain it isn't too much in this case. The butterfly was back lit and the hazy quality might be desired as part of the sense of place and time.